Re: Why doesn't Amazon enforce a password policy?

["Jamie Riden" <jamesr () europe com>]

On 25/10/06, James Strassburg <JStrassburg () directs com> wrote:
> There is a small war going on where I work.  I am trying to get a
> password policy enforced for our web applications and certain business
> leaders are opposing it.  There are two areas of opposition:
>
> 1. Minimum password length of 6 (currently 4, 6 was going to be a
> compromise).
> 2. Expiration of passwords (currently none).
>
> Strength requirements on the password content seems to be ok with them.
>
> These leaders compare our business with Amazon (a bit of a reach but we
> go with it for argument's sake) and their main argument for not
> enforcing a minimum password length and password expiration is that
> Amazon doesn't do it.

If you're losing more revenue by putting customers off with your
password policy, than you make by enforcing one it's not 'worth'
doing. At least, if you think about it purely in terms of ROI, but
that is how some people think about it.

Now, I doubt Amazon lose many sales because people are concerned about
their lack of a password policy - the canny ones will use a decent
password anyway, and the rest don't mind. But if you make the
customer's life difficult, some will give up on the site. (I'm not
saying you shouldn't enforce a password policy despite this - I would
push it, but then I'm not an accountant.)

Can't you make the strength requirements 'at least n bits of entropy'?
That should make up for not having a length requirement, and that's
all the minimum length is meant to achieve anyway. And make sure you
do the ROI calculations for *your* business model and don't let them
get away with the 'we're nearly Amazon, we'll do what they do' thing.

cheers,
Jamie
--
Jamie Riden, CISSP / jamesr () europe com / jamie.riden () gmail com
NZ Honeynet project - http://www.nz-honeynet.org/

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